What you might call Roslingism (after Hans Rosling, RIP) is a 3-step fallacious reasoning pattern: 1. Discard first-principles sociology as junk 2. Paint a pure economics/numbers based whitish picture 3. Do an invalid extrapolation to rosy alt-sociological conclusions
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Roslingism is not false, but it’s a decidedly dangerous half-truth. High-modernist legibilization of sociology and psychology via neoliberal market economics lenses. Seeing like a market. The main thing it misses is human *cognitive* development accompanying material progress.
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It’s swept under the rug of formal education. Which really doesn’t work to replicate the effects of organic societal development in the West over centuries as opposed to globalization spillover. You can leapfrog technologically and materially but not sociologically.
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The rosy Roslingism picture of the developing world is dangerously delusional on 2 fronts: environmental externalities (recognized) and failure of “leapfrogging” on a sociological level (unrecognized). Result: neopatrimonialist medieval societies with a thin veneer of modernity.
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It’s a time bomb waiting to go off at the right level of political stress. Ignoring it and pretending All Is Well in the developing world is as bad an error as ignoring forces that brought us Trumpism in developed world. Smartphones for all don’t magically fast forward societies.
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You’d think we’d have learned by now that the economic numbers *never* tell the whole story. But even know, 3 years into the great weirding we have very smart people insisting All Is Well simply because the economics heat signature has been weak so far.
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We’re making the same mistake in projecting the future of the developing world. As someone with a foot in both worlds who lived through the “takeoff” in 1990s India, I’m optimistic, but not delusionally so. The growth has come at a real cost. The Piper remains to be paid.
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What people are feeling *matters*. It’s the half of the story sociologists and psychologists try, however poorly, to actually get at directly, instead of declaring “the graphs all point the right way so we must be happy and prospering. If you don’t agree you’re just confused.”
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This has been shown to be untrue in the developed world and will be in the developing world as well. I see the growing subterranean sociological tensions every time I visit India or any part of the developing world. All is NOT well.
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I always felt there’s something missing in Pinker and Rosling’s models but wasn’t quite sure how we can measure it. What would you suggest? Self-reported level of happiness is not a great option either.
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Qualitative methods, not measurement
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